Toronto Photography Meetup Group

I'm looking to purchase some HD and looking at green vs black from WD. Is there a major performance difference between the two? It'll be mostly use for backup in my server (Dlink 323) with some video editing. I can get for the same price a 1.5TB green drive or a 1TB black drive from WD.

I'm assuming it would not matter but would like to get a second or third opinion.

Thanks

is green for environmentally friendly?

The Black series are geared for performance and I believe spin at 7200RPM. The Green series are supposed to be more energy efficient, so they spin slower (I believe 5400RPM) and consume less power, generate less heat.

For backup and storage the Green series should be fine.

Green - 3 year warranty
Black - 5 year warranty

Just got two blacks. Fast and solid.

Just got two blacks. Fast and solid.

I have four Green 1.5TB drives in my RAID backup server/library and they work great. I would use their Black drives inside my Mac Pro.

Thanks for the advice everyone.

The only real advantage to to "green" drives is that some of them are a little quieter. Highlight little because the difference is very small. The Blacks out perform the green's for the cost of 1-2 watts of electricity. And that 1-2 watt difference only exists when accessing the drive. If you are writing to your drive 24 hours a day, 365 days a year it would cost you $0.92 more to operate a black drive per year. But realistically your drive is probably only being accessed, on average, for only a few minutes of each hour. Dropping the operating cost difference to a few cents a year at most.

I went with a 1Tb WD Black about 3 months ago - it replaced my internal drive (500Gb)

It runs faster for sure - but is noisier and hotter

Neither of which bother me - the internal drive needs to be fast

For external backup, the speed of your connection is more important, than the speed of the drive - use eSATA or Firewire over USB

Thanks again.

Got a couple of Blacks WD 1TB over the weekend and in process of transfering data to the new drives. Taking longer than I thought it would through a wired network to the externals via esata.

At least I'll know how long it'll take to transfer it back to the servers.

Where do you guys put all your HDs? External enclosure?

Any recommendation for good external enclosure? Any good multi-bay one out there?

I have a Dlink 323 network storage which fits 2 HDs. I have 2 external cases by Eagle, one is being used as a HD PVR extender with a 640GB drive in it and gives me hrs and hrs of recording. Second one is hooked up to the main computer via esata.

There are many good external enclosures out there, it'll all depend on what you'll need and how much you want to spend.

I was looking for some enclosure that i can put more than 1 HD. I now have one of this but just without the screen and bottoms.


http://www.stardom.com.tw/sohoraid_sr2_feature.html

I like it because it has Firewire 800 connection and a built-in power supply.

I don't like NAS because it has to be FAT32 and there's a file size limitation.

Not true on both accounts. It all depends on what NAS you have.